Euro summer isn’t over if you don’t want it to be. Just ask Zara Larsson, whose fifth album, Midnight Sun, keeps the good vibes, long days, and late nights going. From start to finish, Larsson’s latest refuses to ever slow down, instead trafficking in high-energy dance-pop joy.
Hailing from pop mecca Sweden, Larsson wanted to celebrate the sun-drenched energy of a summer in her home country. Title track “Midnight Sun” is as deliriously hypnotic as the experience of partying through 24 hours of daylight. With notes of trance in its swirling chorus uplifted by Larsson’s extended run, the song is the perfect high-energy kickoff to the rest of the LP.
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As the album progresses, Larsson jumps between the more sweet and sour emotions that percolate in the heat. Like “Midnight Sun,” songs like “Blue Moon,” “Euro Summer,” and “Puss Puss” (Swedish for “kiss kiss”) traffic in the sweetness: she waxes poetic through tender scenes of short sundresses, late-night phone calls and handprints left on her ass. But the more interesting moments are when she’s a little naughtier. On “Girl’s Girl,” she’s wracked with guilt for wanting a childhood-friend’s man. Meanwhile, over the stomp beat of “Pretty Ugly,” she threatens slashed tires and crashed cars. “Have you ever seen a pretty girl get ugly like this?” she threatens early on the track.
The more complex, ugly feelings start to bleed into sleepless ruminations about her life. “The Ambition” pulls a few pages from the raw moments of Charli XCX’s Brat: Here Larsson yearns to be bigger, brighter. “But that’s the thing with the ambition/I want it so much/Everything’s a competition/So out of touch,” she declares on one of the biggest earworm moments of the project. “Saturn’s Return” is a standout in this vein, as the 27-year-old leans into life’s confusions, giving up control she sought when she was younger.
Those messier moments are where Larsson comes alive. You can hear her coming into her own across Midnight Sun, where even her more formulaic moments still shine brighter than that Swedish summer sun. That ambition is paying off.
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